


The Ways of Humans

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2016 [125]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 09:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8838937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Animorphs, Ax, he doesn't know why some people treat him so strangely when he's in morph."





	

Ax knew that he wasn’t fluent in the ways of humans, but he’d watched Prince Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias. He understood _hello_ and _goodbye_ and shaking hands, not playing with mouth sounds too much, showing his teeth to indicate he was friendly ( _smiling_ ). He knew how to walk and follow people in public, how to open doors and sit on chairs and eat food with his mouth. If he was with one of the others, the humans treated him kindly, but when he was alone, his attempts to engage with other humans often went awry, and he didn’t understand why. He missed home, he missed the other cadets, and he missed the way he and the others could talk - mind to mind, emotion to emotion, vision to vision.  
  
Not here. Humans were mysteries, impenetrable walls of skin and clothes.  
  
What the others didn’t know was that Ax didn’t stay in the forest full-time. When it was cold or otherwise inclement outside, he had a shelter of sorts. A woman lived near the edge of the forest, alone in her home, and she kept a fluffy, pale-furred canine as a pet. The dog was free to roam the forest, but he always returned home. It was easy to acquire his form for morph. It was an accident, the first time the woman mistook Ax for her pet.  
  
But he’d been drawn to her, instinctively, and the food she possessed, and she didn’t mind when he experimented with mouth-sounds, and the way she ran her hands over his fur was very pleasant. She allowed him to lie on the couch with her while she watched television - though she disliked _these messages_ and had a tendency to change the channel when they came on - and she allowed him to eat food off the floor and she allowed him to sleep on her bed beside her while she read or wrote.  
  
He sneaked into the bathroom to reset his morph whenever two hours drew near, and he remained with her as long as he could until the weather improved.  
  
She spoke to him as if he were a human, though she expected no response.  
  
And then one day, while they were watching television, she said, “Humans are complicated, Flashbang. The way we communicate is complicated. Most people rely on words and facial expressions, but the way we talk to each other? Is so much more than that. The tiniest shift in someone’s face - quirk of a brow, hint of a smile, we register it without even thinking about it, and we react. Same with body language - is their posture open or closed?”  
  
She scratched behind Ax’s ears, and he leaned into her touch. Ear-scratches were the best.  
  
“There are so many other things we read in other people that we don’t even really recognize, but we react to each other. We read and assess, and our instincts are generally pretty good. That’s why humanoid robots freak us out. They aren’t quite human enough, but we can’t put our finger on why.”  
  
Ax wondered how any Andalite or creature capable of morphing could learn to be a human.  
  
“But sometimes our instincts are wrong,” she said. “Irrational societal prejudices override our natural instincts toward safety. We look at someone, at the color of their skin, and we think they’re dangerous. Like people think you’re scary just because you’re big. But you’re not scary, are you?” She kissed Ax on the snout, smiled at him, called him a good boy.  
  
And then _these messages_ ended, and another program came on.  
  
The next time Ax went out with the rest of the Animorphs, he watched them very closely. Girls often laughed at Marco, and they fluttered their eyelashes at Prince Jake. Girls did not often speak to Tobias. Sometimes they raised their voices at Rachel. Everyone liked Cassie, though. So Ax smiled as she smiled, and stood as she stood, and said little, lest he be tempted to play with mouth sounds.  
  
But one day, a boy narrowed his eyes at Ax and said, “What are you looking at, rice eater?”  
  
“I’m not eating rice right now,” Ax said.  
  
Marco stepped forward. “Back the hell up, jerk.”

The boy sneered. “I see your kind sticks together.” He raised his chin at Cassie. “You gonna weigh in, Jemimah?”  
  
“Her name is Cassie,” Ax said, confused.  
  
“Leave it.” Cassie’s tone was a warning.  
  
“I don’t understand.” Ax looked the boy up and down. “Why is my kind different from your kind? Are we not all human?”  
  
The boy huffed. “No, we’re not.”  
  
Rachel, Prince Jake, and Tobias arrived.  
  
Rachel moved to stand beside Cassie. “What’s going on here?”  
  
“I’m confused,” Ax said. “This boy called Cassie ‘Jemimah’. He says we are not human. Am I not human?”  
  
Rachel fixed the boy with a narrow-eyed look. “Go away, Simon. And take your bigotry with you.”  
  
The boy sneered some more, but Prince Jake crossed his arms over his chest and drew himself up taller, and the boy turned away.  
  
Rachel immediately turned to Cassie, put an arm around her shoulders, a gesture of comfort. “Are you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine,” Cassie said.  
  
Prince Jake and Tobias did not say anything to Marco, but Prince Jake nudged Marco, raised his eyebrows, and Marco took a deep breath, nodded. Humans could not reach each other’s minds but could speak without words. Ax had yet to learn to speak that way in human morph.  
  
No one said anything to Ax, though. After they finished buying supplies at the mall, they split up, the humans back to their homes, Tobias to his meadow. Ax headed for his shelter, but he didn’t stay there long.  
  
He sneaked over to the woman’s house, released her dog from the yard, and morphed into the canine. The woman was just returning from work, and she opened the door, allowed Ax in before her. She set her things down on the kitchen table and knelt to pet him and scratch him behind the ears.  
  
“So good to see you, buddy,” she said, and kissed his nose.  
  
He drank some water from the bowl on the floor while the woman went to change her clothes. She returned a few moments later and sank down on the couch, and Ax hopped up beside her, to rest his head on her lap and let her scratch his ears some more. He gazed at her and her lovely dark skin and wondered why he felt so strange, but then she rubbed his belly and fed him popcorn, and the world made a bit more sense.


End file.
